Fire extinguishing and/or suppression systems enable fire extinguishing and suppression capabilities on commercial and military transportation vehicles, which may include as examples ships, trucks, aircraft, trains, and intermodal container systems. Fire extinguishing and/or suppression systems are among various safety measures that may be mandated and/or subject to government requirements or specifications. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation requires various types of vehicles to incorporate such systems. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires fire extinguishing and/or suppression systems to be present as a safety measure on aircraft to minimize risks that arise in transporting people and certain materials and articles. Such extinguishing and/or suppression systems may be used in civilian and military aircraft to suppress and extinguish a fire that may unexpectedly arise. The system also enables continuous suppression and/or inerting and is adapted to monitor and continuously apply inerting capabilities and agents within various compartments and areas of the vehicle such as an aircraft, which may contain or carry materials or articles that require or are well-suited to benefit from such continuous suppression or inerting. Such materials or articles may include, for purposes of example, fuel contained in fuel tanks, dry compartments or bays that may contain hazardous articles or fumes or vapors, or ordinance or ammunition containers.
Many, fire extinguishing and/or suppression systems, such as those installed in aircraft, include pressurized or unpressurized mixtures containing, inter alia, one or more extinguishing and/or suppression agents. The extinguishing and/or suppression agents may typically be solids (e.g., powder), aerosols, vapor, liquid, liquid particles, or gases, including clear gases with added colorants. Proper operation of fire extinguishing and/or suppression systems, and/or certification thereof, may require ensuring certain characteristics of and/or parameters associated with extinguishing and/or suppression agent(s), such as the concentration of extinguishing and/or suppression agent(s) in the system and when discharged, meet particular criteria (e.g., concentration of agents meeting certain threshold(s)). In many conventional extinguishing and/or suppression systems, measurement systems may be used and/or deployed to provide concentration reading or measurements from a source and/or a spot using a conventional individual sensor, e.g., optical sensor. For example, a conventional individual sensor obtains reading of a given concentration level of extinguisher gases and predicts extinguishing and/or suppression agent levels for an area.
There is a need for further improvements in dispensing and monitoring of extinguishment agents from conventional and traditional approaches to provide more cost effective, directed extinguishment, while maintaining extinguishment levels for a given containment area or structure profile; e.g., wing, engine compartment, cabin, fuselage, nacelle, cowl, storage area, equipment area, cockpit, cargo compartment, auxiliary power unit(s), compartment, and/or fuel tanks so as to provide a high level of protection to people and property and to either meet or exceed aircraft government standards, e.g., FAA regulations, for example, during pre-flight, in-flight, pre-certification, certification, post-certification, routine maintenance, as well as during remanufacturing and recertification of the aircraft components as will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.